Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified

Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."

Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' already.

[Eco-Mono]

Only when tampering with the machine will not make it possible to cheat the vote, and there are very few (although >0) designs that allow for that.

Okay for a survey...

[courteaudotbiz]

I think electronic voting is excellent for surveys, no more than that. Where there is binary information that can't be physically viewed, there can be a flaw, a hack, a security hole. The only hole you will ever find in a paper is if you do it yourself with a punch.

Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[davidwr]

Machines are good at two things:
Marking ballots.
Counting ballots.

But there must be ballots. These ballots must be human-readable at all stages between the marking of the ballot and the canvassing of the election. A human must confirm the ballot is what he intends to vote before actually casting it.

A machine that reads/speaks or writes/marks a paper ballot is invaluable to help the mobility or visually impaired and the illiterate and it can reduce costs in multi-precinct polling places or in polling places that use more than one language.

A separate vote-tally machine can greatly speed up the vote count.

However, you must have a human-readable piece of paper, plastic, or something else we call a ballot in case the vote need to be recounted by hand, and this ballot must be examinable by the voter before he makes his vote official.

Likewise, the ballots must be stored in a location that is protected from tampering until after the election results are final.

I figured it out

[KevMar]

Punch cards.

We need to reinvent punchcards.

Make the ballot display on a computer screen and let the user select the options he wants. When you are done, I punches a human readable card with the results.

Those results are placed into another box by hand after the voter looks over the results. You do the precount from the computer booth, then you feed the cards into a card punch reading machine for the official vote.

recount all you want. you will also have a paper trail. problem solved.

Too little added value

[ecotax]

To summarize the article, hopefully more readable than the Babelfish translation:
The Dutch government sees too little added value in using voting machines, and claims that developing new voting machines will be expensive, and won't solve the problem of the possibility of eavesdropping.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[mwvdlee]

Or rather; when the possibility and scale of fraud possible with voting machines becomes equal or less than that of paper votes.
Let's not kid ourselves here; paper voting isn't perfect either.
Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[CastrTroy]

You may be able to make a machine that it's possible to verify the votes for, but how do you make a machine that nobody could tamper with. You could probably replace the entire internals of most voting machines without anybody noticing.

Illiterate

[Archangel Michael]

We can't do this in the US, because that means disenfranchisement of those people who are illiterate.

I'm sorry, but if you can't figure out how to vote, then maybe, just maybe you don't really need to vote.

Once upon a time people had to care about who they were voting for, enough to learn how to participate in the process. If you don't care enough to learn, why should we tailor a system that caters to your illiteracy?

If that is what people want, why not put pictures on the ballots like all the other illiterate countries do?

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[CastrTroy]

All for the low low price of only $1000 per voter. Seriously. Paper is cheap, and has served us well for many years. How much is too much for something that only does as good as paper. For the cost of electronic voting machines to be worth it, it has to be many times more reliable and accountable than paper. What is the true cost of purchasing, operating, and maintaining voting machines that we can guarantee are significantly better than paper. And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[Alwin Henseler]

Frankly, the only reason I can think of someone wanting the illiterate to vote is if they are planning on tricking them into voting as part of their hoard.

Just because someone can't read or write, or has little formal education, doesn't mean they're stupid. Intelligence, education and skills are not the same thing (although related).

A comment like yours sounds like a landowner telling one of his slaves: now go do this, because I know what's best for you!

In many cases you may be right, but who are you to say? If 99% of a nation is made up of monkeys, then democracy means the monkeys will run the country. If you don't like that, trying to keep them from voting is the wrong way to go. Instead, help people inform themselves, so that they can make a better choice.

Some of it is our own fault

[beadfulthings]

Paper certainly is cheap, and it's been around a long time--a much longer time than exit polls, on-the-spot reporters, and cable news. We've now grown to expect that a winner will be declared in State X fifteen minutes after the polls close there. Used to was, people waited days to know the election results. The famous (or infamous) DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN newspaper headline from the U.S. presidential election in 1948 is certainly an example of premature "certainty" in election results. After television arrived, people could stay up all night "watching the election returns" and retire to bed, exhausted, still not knowing the outcome. It takes a little longer to count paper ballots, but it's certainly worthwhile considering some of the alternatives. We just have to get over our desire for almost-instant gratification.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[bsDaemon]

I'm all for education, its a great thing. We need more of it, desperately. I'm also not saying that they're stupid (though they very well may be) just because they can't read. Everyone has to learn some time.

I'm just saying, how do you know you're being told the truth if you can't read? The document at hand may be false, and reading wouldn't necessarily help then, but you could look at others to see if they support the claim.

If a "helper" is there telling you which box to check for which candidate, how will you know they're really "helping?" Whether that helper is a human, or a computer, either of which may be tampered with to some extent.

The only way anyone can ever really be sure of anything is if they do the research of themselves, and the key to that is reading.

Otherwise people who really DO want to keep people down WILL take advantage of those who are most vulnerable -- those who must always listen because they can't get information any other way.

What's so hard about traceable electonic voting

[keithpreston]

I can't see why these companies don't come up with a decent design for electronic voting. It could be easy, traceable and could be much better then paper voting. For each person voting generate a unique person id. Then for every item voted on generate another unique vote id. Print a receipt to every person showing there person id and vote ids. Make this database of vote ids and what was voted for publicly accessible on the internet. This way I can determine if my vote counted and this can easily be audited by everyone! Next have a private database that links every vote to the person id. You could even have a third database of person id to identifiable information. This can now be audited internally to fight off multiple votes from the same person. Problem solved! Voting that is accurate and traceable.

Re:Some of it is our own fault

[CastrTroy]

I really don't understand the US need to have votes counted so quickly. You vote in November. The president gets sworn in in January. Lots of time for counting.

Re:I figured it out

[apt-get moo]

Punch cards. We need to reinvent punchcards.

IIRC the voting machines which were used in some counties of Florida during the 2000 presidential elections worked with punch cards like this. But while the voter can control (or rather assume) whether the card has been punched correctly, he doesn't know about the reading machine. You could end up with lots of invalid votes or even worse, votes for the wrong candidate.
The latter case assumedly happened in a largely jewish and democratic county with overproportionally many votes cast for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[bsDaemon]

If they are reading brail, that is still reading. I'm not talking about people who are not physically able to see the paper, i'm talking about people who can and still don't know how to read.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[CastrTroy]

The counting population of Canada is a fraction of the counting population of the USA.

Re:What's so hard about traceable electonic voting

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that you don't want voting to be traceable. You want it to specifically not be traceable. You shouldn't be able to tell who voted for who. After things are said and done with, I shouldn't even be able to prove who I voted for (so I can't prove it to someone else who was coercing me). What you need is a system that you can verify with a high degree of certainty, that once you cast your vote, that it will be counted properly, and that the same will happen for all other votes cast. The only way to do this is with physical pieces of paper. Because you can be sure that once you put it in the ballot box, that it doesn't leave (you can have people watching the box). And that once the box is opened for counting, that they are counted correctly. You can do this by having people observe the opening and counting process to ensure that things are done right. With electronic voting, votes can leave the ballot box without anybody noticing (deleting records), and votes can be added without anybody noticing (adding records).

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[timholman]

And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?

And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.

In the U.S., the entire fuss over electronic voting machines began because the 2000 presidential election hinged on determining a majority that was within the error margin of spoiled ballots. The problem is that paper voting will always produce spoiled ballots. It doesn't matter how simple you make the process (e.g. "Just put in an X in one of these two boxes"), a certain percentage of the electorate (e.g. the mentally ill, the illiterate, the very elderly, the mentally handicapped) will screw it up.

So in typical fashion, U.S. politicians went overboard and tried to "fix" the spoiled ballot problem with electronic voting machines. The problem with that method is that you'll never get people to have 100% trust in computerized voting. Someone, somewhere, will always make accusations of vote fixing, even if you create a paper trail. So now the pendulum is swinging back to paper ballots.

I'm just hoping I won't see another presidential election so close in my lifetime, because no matter what voting technique you use, the loser will cry foul in a very close race. Fortunately it only seems to happen every 40 years or so (Kennedy's election being the previous example), which provides enough time for the fuss to die down.

Re:What's so hard about a decent electronic voting

[SwedishPenguin]

Secret ballots are used in all (that I know of) democracies of the world for a reason.

What if someone threatened to kill you or do other harm to you or your family if you didn't show them a receipt showing that you did in fact vote as they wanted.

Having a receipt of who you voted for also opens the door to selling votes to the highest bidder. As it stands, there would be no way for the buyer to verify that they did vote as they wanted.

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[KDR_11k]

In a sane election system that difference would not matter anyway as both sides would end up with the same power. It's just insane to declare a single winner based on such a tiny difference, it leaves half the nation unrepresented.

Probably a very stupid question but..

[TomC2]

As a naive Brit who's only ever voted on paper..

If the only way an electronic count will be trusted is by a paper audit trail, then presumably those paper printouts will still have to be counted by hand to verify that they get a result acceptably close to the result the computer gives. In which case, what have we gained in using computers to do the count?

If a manual count of the computer-printouts is not carried out, then how does a printed copy give me the voter any reassurance at all? It would reassure me that I'd not accidentally voted for the wrong person, but could not prove to me that my vote has been counted.

I can understand the argument that if the source code to the program is open then I could inspect it, but most voters are unlikely to have the expertise to do that.

Re:Some of it is our own fault

[HybridJeff]

Paper ballots don't take days to tabulate, we use them exclusively in Canada and final results are always in within a few hours of the polls closing. Thats the final tally, not some estimate based on 5% of the vote being counted.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[TechyImmigrant]

The counting population of Canada is a fraction of the counting population of the USA.

The population of counters rises linearly with the population of voters. The 'humans count' solution scales beautifully.

Count them where they are cast

[daBass]

Paper is easier to commit fraud with, but voting machines allow for much larger scale of fraud if they are hacked.
When we find a way to guarentee a limit to this scale, voting machines will become more reliable than paper.

I disagree. Here's how to make paper safer than any machine will ever be:

Mark the paper with a pencil, put it in a box. All day long, party representatives are welcome to keep their eye on the boxes. At the end of the day, election officials do the counting, in the same place where to votes were cast so there is no possibility of switching in transit. The party representatives are there looking over their shoulder and doing their own count. If there is a dispute, there's an awful lot of witnesses.

Because the number of voters per precinct will be relatively low, the undisputed result will be known in a couple of hours at the most and because there were party representatives at every precinct, they know what the national total should add up to, so no chance for any shenanigans by the central authority there either.

This is how the Canadians do it, by the way. Nobody ever disputes an election in Canada.

No machine will ever beat that. The more sophisticated your encryption and tamper proofing, the more sophisticated the fraud - it's an arms race you can't win.

Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Illiteracy is not equatable with stupidity.

Re:Illiterate

[et764]

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I don't know how to put it into practice. I personally think not only should people be able to read to vote in the US, they should demonstrate a knowledge of the way the US government is supposed to work. This includes things like the fact that the president has no constitutional authority for half (perhaps even all) the things they promise to do if elected.

The problem is I can't think of a good way to enforce it. In the past there have been literacy tests for voting, and my understanding is that they were primarily used to keep blacks and other minority groups from voting. Do we make a voter licensing test? Who gets to decide what's on the test? Hopefully it would just include relatively factual things, such as the branches of government, what duties the Constitution assigns to each branch, and how the people in each branch are chosen. However, I could just as easily see people using it to filter out someone who should be voting. If we used what I thought people should understand before voting as the standard, we would probably end up disenfranchising a lot of the left, because I believe the Constitution was designed on the principles of limited government and didn't intend for the federal government to dabble in things like universal healthcare. Someone else might disenfranchise me on account of the idea that it's immoral to let someone die in the street because they can't afford to buy food. (For the record, I don't like the idea either, I just think there are other ways of dealing with it than government)

The sum of all this is, I'd rather tolerate a few uninformed voters than risk excluding people's voices who may not fit the profile of what some authority thinks is a person suitable to vote. Hopefully the people who care enough to take the time to fill out a ballot also pay attention in civics class and learn something about how the system works.

Re:Difficult?

[flajann]

It is not that it's not difficult to do -- in fact, it's down right easy -- the problem lies in making the technology secure and tamper-free.

In this age of spyware, viruses, trojan horses and the like, anything is possible, especially when political power is involved. Plus, the way e-voting works is beyond the understanding of most people, so there is no confidence in the process.

Truth of the matter is, it's just WAY TOO EASY to tamper with the voting results and there is NO AUDIT TRAIL unless paper is involved. There should ALWAYS be a paper trail to audit the votes, period.

Re:Countries that use voting machines?

[flajann]

And what measure does Brazil have in place to prevent electronic tampering with the results? Do they have any kind of paper trail at all? How easy would it be for a monkey to go to the main database server tallying the votes, alter a few records, and throw the entire election without a trace?

As much as I love technology, I stand firmily against it's use in voting UNLESS there is a strong, physical, foolproof audit trail to back it up, such as paper ballots, that can be hand-counted (and should ALWAYS be hand-counted to verify the electronic votes are correct).

Yes, it takes longer and is not sleek and shiny, but truth being told, it's much harder to foil paper ballots than the electronic variety. Hell, if I knew that Brazil's servers had an Internet connection, I could throw their election from the comforts of my bedroom here in the States with just my laptop.